Behind me Laurence had flipped on the overhead light.
And I knew why he had stopped breathing.
The body of a man was lying on top of the bed. Neatly wrapped in what looked, at first glance, like shiny butcher paper and twine. The only things visible were his head and his hands and feet.
His head was intact.
One hand was missing. And one foot was gone.
Laurence marched up to the bed. “It’s not him,” he said in a strange voice. “It’s not Dickie.”
“So where is Dickie then?” I said. “And who the fuck is that?”
“He might have been in the truck,” Laurence said. He was still staring at the face of the man on the bed.
“Yes,” I said. “But he definitely wasn’t driving.”
“Dickie…” Laurence started to say, but I stopped him.
“I know,” I said. “I know.”
* * *
I was never so happy to see a rotary dial telephone.
The 911 operator was a little impatient with my inability to give her clear directions, but once she heard me say the magic words – “Dickie Doyle’s place” – everything went a lot more smoothly. I assured her that the body on Dickie’s bed was not, in fact, Dickie, and gave her as good a description as I could of the yellow pickup. She told me to stay put and not touch anything else, and emergency services would be here as soon as they could. I imagined they would have to start pulling people from other counties at this point.
Laurence was standing in the kitchen and I could tell that it was all he could do not to start doing dishes. It was his fall-back position when things got hairy: rubber gloves and lots of soap and water.
“Don’t touch anything,” I said.
“I know that, Danny,” he said. “Jesus.”
We were silent for a minute. Laurence standing stock-still at the kitchen end of the cabin, and me perched on the edge of the couch. We both stared at the bedroom door, as if the neatly wrapped body on the bed might get up at any minute.
“Who do you think it is?” I said.
Laurence shook his head. “We’ll talk about that later,” he said.
“We just missed them,” I said. Laurence nodded. I saw him glance at the kitchen counter, where one of us had put our rock down. I imagined fighting off a killer with it, someone who was going around cutting off people’s hands and feet. I thought for a second about what tool would have been used for that. Definitely not a rock. “Do you think Dickie…?” I couldn’t finish. I had met Dickie once, when I was a kid and Laurence was rooming with Dickie at Bennington. But Laurence had known him for well over twenty years. They might not be best friends any longer, but that’s a long time to keep up a college friendship.
“What, has something to do with this?”
I nodded.
Laurence looked at me like he wasn’t even going to bother answering that one. Then he said, “Danny, when we were in school I used to host movie nights. Remember?” I did. Growing up, we were one of the first families in town to get a VCR, and before any video stores came to town, Laurence would be writing away to get movies sent to us. Classics, but he also had a penchant for teenager-in-peril slasher films. When Mom and Dad went into Boston for a weekend once, Laurence made Darren, Ginger, and me watch all of the Friday the 13th films with him. Ginger had spent most of that weekend with a pillow in front of her face. “Bean, trust me: Dickie got so sick at even the idea of blood and violence he would put his headphones on if he couldn’t find anything else to do to get him out of there. He had to drop Bio in first year because he couldn’t dissect anything. I’m surprised he even eats meat, come to think of it.” He nodded to the sink, where the steak was still sitting in the pan.
In the distance, through the quiet night, I could hear sirens. “So Dickie definitely didn’t do this.”
“No,” Laurence said. “Absolutely not.” I believed him, but I knew there was something he wasn’t telling me yet.
“But someone wants to fuck with him enough to leave a severed hand on his property, and a dead guy trussed up in his bed like an Easter ham,” I said.
“And kidnap him,” Laurence said.
I didn’t say it, but I was hoping that’s what had happened. It was dark out there. It occurred to me that Dickie could be out there somewhere, dead or dying. He might not have been in the yellow truck at all. And the yellow truck could just be a coincidence – the population was pretty small, chances are you would notice a vehicle like that around, doesn’t mean it had anything to do with this. But of course it did, I knew it did. I knew that whoever was driving that truck had taken the hand and the foot of the dead man in the bed not fifteen feet from me. And he probably had Dickie.
The sirens were on top of us now, and before cops could bust through the door with guns drawn I ran outside and waved my hands in the air frantically. I hoped that no nervous trigger-happy rookie took me for the hand stealer. Be calm, move slowly, and let them see your hands, until they’re sure you’re one of the good guys.
And if you’re not? Make like a tree and leave.
I glanced at the woods to my left, suppressing a sudden urge to do just that – run into the woods and avoid this whole mess of police and body bags and death. I didn’t ask for this, not this time. I kept telling myself it had nothing to do with me.
And yet here I was.
“Fuck me,” I said out loud. Someone was there. I saw something move in a sliver of moonlight. I was sure I’d seen a flash of red in the woods to my left, between Dickie’s cottage and the next one down the lake. I saw it again, something red bobbing, definitely higher than animal height. Unless the deer in these parts had taken to wearing baseball caps.
And I ran.
Not back into the cottage, or up the driveway toward the sirens, like any sane person.
I ran into the woods. I ran toward the red hat in the dark.
SIX
For once when running toward danger, I wanted to make as much noise as possible.
I squatted to grab another rock on the ground and retied my Keds, keeping my eyes trained on where I had seen what I thought was the hat.
I couldn’t see the flash of red any longer, now that I was ten feet into the brush. There was probably an acre or so of it between Dickie’s and the next cabin, which I had noticed driving in had been dark.
I stopped moving and listened, glad I had spent my childhood playing in the Maine woods. I knew that as soon as the pounding of blood in my ears subsided, I would begin to hear life all around me – crickets and the wind moving softly through the trees, the small, distinct sounds of the creatures who lived in the woods all around. I measured the weight of the rock in my hand and stepped further in.
I wanted this to be over. I would fight whoever this was, fight and at least slow him down until the police caught up to us. Nobody deserved what had happened to that man in the cabin, whoever he was. And if this man was allowed to continue, Dickie could be his next victim. And by extension, all the people who loved Dickie. Including my brother.
Enough pain. Enough killing. Especially of people I loved.
I heard Laurence calling my name, though even this small distance away it sounded a bit muffled. I had limited hearing in my right ear, after a fight with a bow and arrow in Maine. I had to concentrate to tell in which direction sound came from. I willed Laurence to stay where he was. I could hear the commotion of sirens and loud voices behind me near the cabin.
He was here. I could feel it, and somewhere at the base of my skull a shiver formed.
My brain told my muscles to be ready, and I quickly tensed and then consciously relaxed, like I used to do before a fight.
I took another step and heard it, the softest voice, nearly a whisper.
“Danielle,” it said. And what I could have sworn was, “Go home, dear.”
Something came flying through the trees and landed somewhere near me.
“In here!” I yelled over my shoulder, toward Laurence and the men wi
th guns, and I moved carefully in the direction I thought it had come from. Closer to the lake. I saw the flash of red again, or thought I did, and then it was gone. And behind me the woods were lit up as men with powerful flashlights followed me, calling my name.
“I’m here, right here. I’m wearing a light shirt,” I called. I stopped and put my hands on my head. I was glad I was wearing a white t-shirt, and hoped that my warning would mean that nobody would nervously shoot into the darkness thinking they had seen the killer.
I walked lightly back the way I had come. In the way that I sometimes knew things I couldn’t explain, I knew the killer was out of my grasp for now. I kept my hands on my head and walked carefully and slowly, retracing my steps, looking for whatever had been thrown at me. From the sound it had made when it landed, it wasn’t a rock. I more than half expected to see a neatly wrapped package that contained a severed foot. We’re still missing a foot, I thought, looking down. I’m giving the police a hand finding the foot. Ha, ha.
But this time it wasn’t a foot. And it wasn’t wrapped in butcher paper.
It was a head.
And in the time it took me to sink to the ground in a faint, I registered that it belonged to Evan.
Evan, the young security guard at Rose’s Place. The kid who couldn’t make coffee. He should be at work. He should be at Rose’s.
I backed up a few steps and let myself sink to a sitting position. The carbonation in my brain had started, and that was the last I knew.
SEVEN
Laurence had explained to the men who carried me out of the woods that I was a fainter, and that there was nothing to worry about. But to be safe they had stuck me in the back of an ambulance with a crinkly foil blanket around my shoulders, drinking lukewarm hot chocolate. But other than a sore wrist and a scraped-up forehead from the fall in the woods, I was fine.
Physically, that is.
I had seen my fair share of dead bodies. And had even been responsible for making a couple of them dead. And only the morning before, I had pulled a severed hand out of an innocent-looking mailbox.
But a head? Another thing altogether. And the fact that it had belonged to an innocent kid I had talked with nearly every day for the past two weeks was icing on the cake.
“Are you going to throw up?” a cop near me asked. He had been given the unenviable task of guarding me while police swarmed the forest. The woods and the lake were lit up with floodlights, and I watched from my vantage point high up the driveway as a diver emerged from the lake.
The only miracle was that the media wasn’t here yet.
“No,” I said. I managed something like a smile. “Not yet.”
“She usually does, though, after a good faint,” Laurence chimed in. He put his arm around me. “Don’t you, Beanpole?” I nearly cried then. I leaned into him and let myself rest for a second. I had failed to catch or even slow down the killer, and now he – probably – had Dickie.
Laurence was wrong this time. I didn’t feel sick. I felt like I wanted to sleep, and then I wanted to find Dickie. And get my ass back to the big city, where there was less crime. If I needed any more help staying away from crack, I’d hire someone to be my sober companion or something. It was the newest thing, and I could afford it. I’d hire somebody who knew the value of restful silence, and who liked kids. We’d hang out with the twins and shoot some hoops.
But after. After I found Dickie. If I caught the killer in the process, fair enough, but as far as I was concerned, he was the police’s problem. I’m no one-woman army. I wanted to take care of my own and stay out of trouble, but apparently I couldn’t even manage to do that in rural Nova Scotia.
More police arrived, and more lights. I didn’t know how many people would be at their cottages yet, but the weather had been clear and fine. I heard a uniformed woman fifteen feet away talking to someone about a house-to-house search of the area, which I thought was a good idea.
Eventually a familiar face approached us as Laurence and I stood a few feet away from the ambulance to avoid any nasty accidents with oxygen and smoked cigarettes. Detective Murphy.
“You seem to have a knack,” he said to me, shaking my hand. “Wrong place at the wrong time.”
“Story of my life, Des,” I said, causing Laurence to look at me funny. He didn’t know that Des and I were old friends by now.
“How you doing? That must have been one hell of a shock. Hell of a shock.” He didn’t look too well himself, in fact. I didn’t blame him. I patted his arm.
Des had been one of the last cops to arrive on the scene, so he hadn’t been in on the initial vetting process that Laurence and I had gone through. I made the introductions, and noticed how subdued Laurence was. His oldest friend was missing, possibly – probably – in the hands of a demented killer. Tends to make the charm a little thin on the ground.
“Well you folks can leave now,” Des said. “Nothing more you can do tonight, and we have an initial statement from you both. We’ll want you to come in tomorrow and give videotaped statements, if you don’t mind.”
I nodded. “But wait,” I said. “I’m supposed to be staying at Rose’s. Is everyone else okay? Evan was there when we left earlier tonight.”
“Right,” Des said. He looked around for a minute. “Look, for now the place is locked down. The property is being searched top to bottom and everyone’s being questioned.” He looked at the cabin for a minute. The body hadn’t been carried out yet, that I had seen. He looked back at me. “You might have a problem finding a hotel at this point. We’re pretty booked up for the Apple Blossom Festival around here, plus we’ve got police coming from all over, and our people here have booked up as many spare rooms as we could. This might take a while.”
“I have a reservation at a B and B,” Laurence said. “But who knows if they held it for me.” He looked at his watch. “Danny can stay with me.”
Des nodded. “Good enough. But if they gave the room away, I’ll tell you what. Go back to Rose’s and tell them the situation, and tell them I said to give you a place to sleep there. I’m sure they can make sure a couple of rooms are safe for you.”
We agreed and I shrugged off my shock blanket. “Do you know who the…” I gestured into the cabin. “The guy on the bed is?”
Des looked around him. “I can’t tell you that,” he said.
“Which means you do know,” I said. “Please. You know my history. I need to know if this is a local.” I didn’t finish. I wanted to make sure this had nothing to do with me and what had happened in Maine. It seemed beyond the pale that something like this could be happening in my vicinity and not have something to do with the man who had killed my loved ones and then disappeared. In the last hour, standing outside with Laurence, it had been all I could think about. If somehow I, or the demons in my past, had brought carnage to this corner of the world – and to Laurence’s oldest friend – I needed to know.
“He’s a local,” Des said quietly. “Was. But if I hear that on the news later, I’m going to know it came from you. You keep that to yourself, you understand?”
“Is he a friend of Dickie’s?” Laurence asked quietly. “I’m sorry, I know you aren’t supposed to say anything. But you must have checked up on us.” Des looked at the ground, and for a minute I had a flash, a vision of him at home reading to his kids. A gentle man in a tough job, he reminded me for a minute of Paul Belliveau, the Toronto cop who had saved my skin once before. The floodlights showed the dark circles under his eyes and, despite the cool night air out on the lake, the sheen of sweat on his bald head.
Des shook his head. “One of the boys recognized him. A, uh, businessman from Halifax. Known to us.” Known to police – code for he’s got a record. “Was a resident of Rose’s last year. Patient, whatever. And that’s if that’s the right guy. And that’s all I’m going to say on the subject. Shouldn’t have said that.” But he knew we needed to know.
“Thank you,” I said. I touched his arm. “Nobody else will hear that from
us.” He nodded. He looked miserable. “Any ideas?”
“No,” he said simply. “You?” He almost smiled.
“No,” I said. “But they’ve got Dickie.”
“Dickie Doyle has been my friend since we were eighteen years old,” Laurence said. “We’re going to find him.”
Des and I looked at him for a minute. Laurence had spoken almost as though to himself. Des brought his shoulders back, and looked like a cop all of a sudden. “In case you hadn’t noticed, we’ve got a lunatic running around chopping people up. You’ll leave this to us, sir.”
“You don’t think it’s Dickie?” Laurence said.
“No, he doesn’t,” I said. I wanted to get away and think. What I did not want was for my brother to lose his temper and treat the local police like bumpkins. Counterproductive, and I liked Des.
Besides, it would make sense that Dickie would be a possible suspect, as well as possibly being a victim. The body was found in his cabin. The body of a man who had been a resident of the rehab facility that Dickie owned. And Evan had been Dickie’s employee.
And while everyone knew Dickie, and there seemed to be a lot of affection for him around these parts, a lot of people think he did go a little crazy after his wife died.
“I think that if you see Dickie Doyle, Mr. Cleary, you need to head in the other direction and call us,” Des said. “That’s what I think.” He nodded at Mary’s car – Laurence’s car – which had somehow been moved to the end of the driveway. Another thing I had missed.
“You two go and get some rest. We’ll find you tomorrow.”
“Des,” I said to his back. He turned around.
“They called me Danielle,” I said. “The person. The killer. Nobody calls me that. Dickie would have called me Danny.” The cop nodded. I added, “And I’m not sure, but it might have been a woman.”
Des opened his mouth as if to say something but thought better of it, shook his head and tried to smile. He waved goodnight in our direction and disappeared into the cabin.
Rehab Run Page 5
